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Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

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Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#171
post #97
post #4

Are people still using dropbox? I thought other integrated service such as google drive and onedrive would have drove dropbox to the grave

It's the only solution still that "just works" on all OSs and mobile devices. I spent a year trying to use alternatives like Syncthing and Resilio and they all have pain points, especially on mobile. Gave up and just paid for Dropbox. I would gladly self host if there was an option that worked well on mobile.

I've been using Nextcloud and before that Owncloud for years. I recently switched to the native mobile client from a generic web DAV client. It supports one way sync for things like photos which is very handy. My home NC has around 1/2TB in use so far.

I also look after another one for a company with several 1000 users' safety docs on it. Nearly all the clients are mobiles and tablets using the native client. This NC is more of a one way thing where one dept uploads pdfs and the drivers and co read them on their tablets. Office staff point a browser at it.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely a Dropbox upload wasn‘t the only version you had. Couldn‘t you restore easily?

You'd be amazed that folks even today misunderstand it to be a 'backup' instead of a sync service.

It is a backup. Any copy of your data is a backup. It just shouldn't be the only backup (obviously, like any backup.)

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#173

Reminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant. We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything. (Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a…

> plus their own log files covering those deletions

This is the really unreasonable part. Some convoluted internal process that ends up accidentally flagging a file as suspicious and then deleting it is bad enough, but still partially understandable if you're very conservative with assigning blame. But deleting the log files? Either extreme technical incompetence or plain malice.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#174

Reminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant. We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything. (Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a…

Aren't the files still on the computers that Dropbox synced to?

Deleting files from Dropbox's servers, that's fine, deleting files from my computer that I uploaded to Dropbox, that's bad.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely a Dropbox upload wasn‘t the only version you had. Couldn‘t you restore easily?

You'd be amazed that folks even today misunderstand it to be a 'backup' instead of a sync service.

Dropbox calls it a backup service:

https://www.dropbox.com/backup

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#177

Can I take a moment to recommend 'OwnCloud'? ( https://owncloud.com ) I may be out of the loop, but my experience with it has been great. It's a (mostly?) open-source, self-hosted DropBox(ish) clone - with a great UI, web browser support as well as native MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS apps. (I figure there's probably some sort of Linux client as well? I'd have no idea.) I'm shocked that Adult Swim isn't using somet…

I use a similar thing called Seafile on "my own" VPS and love it, syncing to local ZFS NAS with autosnapshots and regular-ish offline and "offsite" backups (two big external drives, swapped whenever I visit family a few states over). Self-hosting FTW. I'm sure owncloud and nextcloud are easier and more complete these days so that'd probably be my choice if I were doing it from scratch. I also do self-hosted CalDAV (radicale) for contacts and calendar, and self-hosted email (dovecot/postfix/spamassassin).

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#179

Reminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant. We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything. (Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a…

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#180
post #65
post #14

Yet another example of why we need a users bill of rights to give users some standardized legal recourse to discover the reasons for account bans and dispute them.

I like bringing up the Uniform Commercial Code [0] as a template for this kind of stuff. Where there’s a common goal and groups push for legislation in each state. Sadly I’m not sure there’s a good advocacy group to push for this. Mozilla is funded by Google who definitely doesn’t want any user rights that conflict with their revenue. Maybe the EFF or FSF. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code

A state by state push would be one way to make this happen, but given that online companies and their users are often in different states, this does seem like the kind of interstate commerce that could be addressed federally.

I'm not hugely optimistic about this. It's possible that the pushback against tech will enable something like this to get passed, but I'm pretty sure that pushback is for purely for political points and not being done with any intent to actually change much.

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